VoxCarnyx

City Halls, Glasgow

At the end of the week when the BBC Scottish announced a new Principal Guest Conductor in Delyana Lazarova, we should have been seeing her predecessor in the post, Ilan Volkov, back on the podium. When Volkov called off for personal reasons, his replacement was Estonian Mihhail Gerts, taking over a challenging programme in its entirety.

At its heart was the UK premiere of Trurliade – Zone Zero (Relief méta-sonore), a half-hour concerto for solo percussion and orchestra by Austrian iconoclast Olga Neuwirth, with local hero Colin Currie the soloist. On either side of that, Prokofiev, his youthful Autumnal Sketch opening the programme and the highly personal, sombre Sixth Symphony filling the second half.

Gerts dealt superbly with that huge challenge. The concerto is as far from being solely in the hands of the soloist as is possible, frantically busy though Currie was. The percussion work in the orchestra was not just in the hands of a six-string section, but also the wind and string players in the use of extended techniques and toys and small instruments.

The conductor kept everything on track with a strict time baton and eloquent, precise left hand cueing, steering a path through a score that sometimes sounded chaotic but is brilliantly structured. The soloist’s initial rubbing and scraping of a hanging gong, crashing of cymbals and thumping of an oil drum was answered by brass interjections and hunting horn calls, those orchestral percussionists adding masses of extra colour.

With two paper copies of the score as well as a tablet computer, Currie dashed between three set-ups on the apron of the stage, and many more instruments – untuned and tuned – than it was possible to count. Yet it was quite possible to forget to watch him because of everything else that was going on in a huge orchestra, augmented with Wagner tubas, contrabass clarinet and tenor saxophone.

The music was constantly changing, sometimes racing away before doubling back on itself, sometimes incremental in pitch and time, throwing out fragments of unresolved melody. It is concerned with the contemporary relationship between humans and machines, both mechanical and systemic, but in a playful, cartoonish and fairground fashion. For all the fun in it, all the details are quite specific.

At its end comes a victory of sorts. After a snatch of “We Shall Overcome” on vibraphone, drum rolls from the back of the orchestra were answered by filigree decoration from the soloist, a voice boomed through a megaphone and Currie wielded an enormous mallet to thump a small cymbal.

Perhaps only a work as dark and ambiguous as Prokofiev 6 could follow that. With its ticking clock motif and clear concerns with the intimations of mortality that the composer had recently endured, it wasn’t the sort of thing Stalin wanted to hear and was banned in 1948. We don’t hear it much now either, but Gerts and the SSO gave a terrific account of the work.

The conductor was very alive to the changes of tempo in the first movement and took a very measured approach to the huge Wagnerian swoon of the Largo, keeping plenty in reserve for the pacey finale, its abrupt halt and deeply ambiguous ending.

Keith Bruce

This concert was broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 and is available to listen to for 30 days on BBC Sounds

Picture of Mihhail Gerts by Kaupo Kikkas